#and I think adaine was surprised by how much she actually cared about aelwyn

[jq37]

It's not just that Aelwyn knew that Adaine was the only one capable of unlocking her failsafe memories. It's that she knew that, deep down, she saw Adaine as her baby sister who she loved and trusted that, if she was ever in such serious trouble that the failsafe needed to be triggered, Adaine would help because, deep down, despite all the over the top vitriol, she loved her too.

[dontmixpaintinyourcoffee]

My take on the Bad Kid scars! AKA my excuse to make like a 4 page Google doc worth of headcanons.

I've thought about this kind of a lot while considering how I draw the Bad Kids because I love when characters carry evidence of their history with them (not just scars, stuff like the tin flower emblem or Figs Ayda-feather-earring also exist in this category, and I have separate notes for those too)

Since magic is a big part of healing in this world I have some stipulations for what actually causes scarring in my own headcanons-

(Rest is under the cut. This bitch is looong and it's technically unfinished. Heads up for descriptions of injuries and spoilers for the first 2 seasons of Fantasy High.)

So here's the rules:

1. It's a big story moment. Random slashes or scratches or whatever don't show up because they're not relevant to the characters history and they're small enough that I think magical means would completely cover them.

2. The attack downs them. This just makes it easier to track, any attack that knocks a character out has the potential to leave a lasting mark.

3. Based on some comments from Brennan, it seems like low level healing magic (ex. Cure Wounds, Healing Word) is essentially time-based. It basically fast-forwards the healing process months in advance. That's gonna affect how scars work. Unless otherwise stated, that's how I'm gonna approach the magical healing process.

Figeuroth Faeth

• Tuna Surprise Eldritch Blast- Doreen (S1E2)

Small burn scar on the left side of her check/around her lips from when she caught the Eldritch Blast with her face. The Phoenix Egg spell mostly took care of it, so it's quite faint, but it still can get tight and itchy. Fig has a special moisturizer for it that she keeps next to her horn cream.

• Torn ear- Figueroth Faeth (S2E12)

Honestly this is mostly because I find it funny. This is from that moment when Fig rips out her earring to give to Ayda in exchange for the feather. It's very common in D&D designs for characters with long ears to have rips or notches in them to show that they're active or battle-worn. I really like this idea of a kind of Jason Grace style scar where you look at her and you wonder "Woah, I wonder what battle caused that" because she's this legendary adventurer but the truth is that she did it to herself because she's a sweet-hearted dumbass who was tripping over herself trying to give her crush a gift. It got healed up soon enough, there's just a divet at the bottom of her ear now.

Riz Gukgak

• Hand Cuts- Crystal Interior (S1E14)

Riz was tearing through his hands trying to get out of that thing, I can't imagine that it didn't leave a lasting impact. Both sides of his hands and a little up his forearms are covered in slashes. They've healed kind of unevenly since he does a lot of work with his hands that require some amount of dexterity and precision (mostly writing, typing, drawing up maps, ect.) The forearm scars are pretty much settled, but the ones on his palms and fingers are still irritable and sometimes painful enough that he has to stop working. It does not help at all that this kid refuses to sleep or stretch or experience rest, so he probably gets a lot of stiffness and cramping too (at least, more than he would if he actually got sleep ever). Since they got re-agitated in Sophomore Year his friends have gotten very good at noticing when he's ignoring the pain and force him to take a damn break every once in a while. He has a tell for it and none of them will tell him what it is. He appreciates that they care about him, but god is the mystery infuriating. He actively refuses to acknowledge the irony of that.

• Lightning to the Chest- Aelwyn Abernant (S1E12)

In the sister fight Aelwyn knocks Riz out with a fucking lightning bolt. This is what sets Adaine completely over the edge. He gets healed up pretty fast, so it's not a life threatening scenario, but it's still a fucking lightning bolt. He's got a circular burn scar in the center of his chest. Much like Figs, it doesn't bother him much, but it still requires some attention and maintenance for at least a couple weeks. Honestly he straight up forgets it's there sometimes. Adaine probably thinks about it more than he does.

Fabian Seacaster

• Enucleation- Dayne Blade (S1E16)

So the main thing here is the eye, but it also covers a good chunk of the left side of his face. Essentially this big slashing weapon caught him right at the top of where his ear connects to the rest of his head and dragged forward far and deep enough to take out his left eye. Also notable is that he doesn't get any medical attention beyond minor heals for a hot minute. And when he gets hit he spends a couple minutes running around a burning house filled with ash and smoke and blood. The moment of Bill giving Fabian his eye patch is incredibly tender. It's also NASTY, dude. That thing is for sure covered in blood and ash and he puts it right over an OPEN WOUND. I love that scene to death, and there is absolutely no way that that thing isn't getting crazy infected without immediate/magical medical attention. I imagine Kristen and Riz took a good chunk of that frozen time to treat it as much as they could. I picture the slash healing into a pretty thick hypertrophic scar that goes from his ear over his eye to the edge of his nose. He definitely had to actually go to a hospital after prom to get proper treatment. His skin could be mostly stitched back together magically, so the main focus from actual medical professionals was putting in an orbital implant and getting him a conformer to maintain the structural integrity of the eye socket. He probably has a bunch of cool decorative prosthetic eyes for big events because he's a fancy little rich boy, but I don't think he actually uses them a lot (for a couple reasons, the main one is the eye patch. Why bother putting it in when he's gonna cover it up immediately anyway?) He just uses the conformer like 99% of the time. The eye patch mostly has sentimental value, but it also does have that charisma stat boost effect, so he has it on when he's adventuring or at school, but takes it off at home. His big issue is adjusting to his new depth perception. He spends months and months re-learning the sword with Hallariel, which is immensely frustrating. He knows how to do it, but he has to completely readjust how he thinks about approaching it, which I think would really get under his skin. Especially since it's such a big part of his identity at this point. It takes him a good while to get back to his previous skill level, but damn if he doesn't do it.

Kristen Applebees

• Gored Through the Chest- The Great Unicorn (S2E17)

100% my least grounded in any form of reality headcanon. She fully resurrected herself. The scar left from the horn of the unicorn is a little more like a slightly raised tattoo than an actual scar. It's more of a magical imprint of the divine act of resurrection than anything left behind by the wound itself. As her bones and skin and muscles literally stitched themselves back together they sort of knitted into a single point, which grew a patch of discolored skin. The skin is thick, and purplish, and shaped like some kind of rune that doesn't actually exist in any surviving magical language. A permanent mark of the impossible magic she enacted. There's an identical mark that's a little bigger on her back, where the horn entered through. A less obvious element of that scar is how it affected her heart. The thing was ripped apart, and basically the only thing that could fix that was god magic. Luckily, she got that! I imagine that her heart now has this weird rippling effect over the muscle, almost like aurora borealis. It doesn't actually affect a ton because, again, god magic, but man does it fuck with medical equipment sometimes. I also think that if you were to cast Detect Magic on her, without any of her gear or spell effects, you would still read that Raise Dead effect just radiating off of her.

• Pinky Finger- Removal and Resurrection

I think that her right pinky finger didn't entirely recover from having a full bone taken out, and now the last knuckle has some mobility issues. It's just really stiff and doesn't really bend on its own. She's also lost a lot of sensation in that finger specifically. It shouldn't get any more intense than that without extenuating circumstances, but given that god magic is a little unpredictable she and her doctor are keeping an eye on it. She does a lot of stretches and exercises to keep her hands loose and moving. Ounce of prevention and all that. It's also a part of her gym bloke routine in Junior Year.

Gorgug Thistlespring

• Slice Through the Hand- Forest of Blades (S1E3)

All the way around his hand there's this line, as though his hand was cut clean through and then perfectly realigned and glued back together. By Sophomore Year the scar has almost completely flattened, it's just a discolored line all the way around the surface of his hand.

• Crushed Heart- Nerd Ghosts (S1E14)

The effects of this one are two-fold; first, the streak of gray hair, second, a lasting effect on his heart. The prolonged strain on the actual organ of his heart from this encounter left him with increased risk for cardiovascular problems that he didn't have before. He doesn't really notice it (mostly because when it's noticeable he's so high on adrenaline that he's not really noticing anything) but his heart is definitely weaker than it should be. It's not life threatening, but it's for sure something that Digby and Wilma have stressed the importance of monitoring because they are good responsible parents. The actual visible impact from the ghost attack is the streak of gray hair he has, which is permanent. It just grows gray there now. He thinks it looks pretty cool.

Adaine Abernant/ O'Shaughnessy

• Teeth Marks- Jawbone O'Shaughnessy (S1E6)

Basically just a dog bite on her right forearm. Normally healing magic would be able to patch that up without any scarring, but the werewolf pathogen adds a complication to it. Still, pretty average looking scar. She feels a little weird about it, cause on the one hand getting it sucked, but on the other hand now every time she sees it she thinks about her amazing new dad, so there's a weird sentimental element. She and Jawbone have for sure had a long discussion about the validness of any of her feelings about it and how it's ok to acknowledge the harm done to her, even by well-intentioned parties. He probably feels a lot worse about it than she does. The reveal of which probably initiated another very long discussion.

• Gored Through the Chest- The Great Unicorn

This time it's just a normal scar, no crazy magical runes involved. I'm not entirely sure how a fully healed version of this injury would actually... Work? The part that's visible would be the broken skin, so probably a combination of a fine-line scar and a depressed scar, (sharp edges + impaling motion) but I'm not entirely sure how to properly translate that visually, or if it's at all realistic. Further research pending. Anyways she and Kristen have matching injury scars! The besties ever

[swarmkeepers]

3 & 4 for the abernant sisters? 👀 (my sister and i have been trading food we don't like that we know the other likes our whole lives and thinking of the abernants learning that kind of thoughtless intimacy between sisters... listen to me sola i know i'm predictable but listen)

3 & 4. quietly picks out the things you don’t like to eat on your plate and transfer it to theirs without you needing to ask them to & quietly gives you the things you like to eat from their own plate + adaine & aelwyn  (prompts linked here)

(post-sophomore year, in the chaos that is a mordred manor dinnertime. at lydia and ragh’s dinner table there will be rice and there will be lumpia because my diasporic half-orc agenda continues (and also if family style asian home cooking isn’t the epitome of saying i love you through food i don’t know what is, the prompt made me do it!). thank you ket i hope i did your favorite elven sisters justice)

In the house that no longer exists, Aelwyn sat at their father’s right hand, across the table from her sister. 

In this house that Aelwyn sometimes cannot really believe exists, she sits next to Adaine, sliding next to her sister on the bench they have claimed for their own because Kristen and Fig cannot be trusted to sit on a bench for fear that they will stand on it to make proclamations, or try to vault spectacularly over it instead of sliding into their seats. 

When Adaine was little she used to kick her feet under the table, restless and reckless and making it her own fault when she stubbed her toe on the table legs or banged into Aelwyn’s feet. 

Aelwyn has forgotten many things about her own life (She has lived so little of her lifespan. She wonders if what she has already forgotten will fade away, just a few months in a sea of other forgotten memories as she ages, or if she will remember their absence forever). 

But these little annoyances from childhood remain—annoying and endearing and just so, so Adaine—clear as day from when she was little too, still petty enough to remember those slights clearly. (Aelwyn wonders what memories Adaine has that she might call just so, so Aelwyn. She can’t think of anything worth remembering.)

Now Adaine doesn’t kick her sock feet but just pulls them up on the bench to tuck them under her as she sits. Something in the back part of Aelwyn’s mind reminds her that this is bad manners, but most of her honestly agrees that this is necessary at this dinner table, where the extra few inches of reach let Adaine beat Fig to the last of Lydia Barkrock’s excellent eggrolls. Aelwyn is learning things every day, lessons that come much harder to her than the effortlessness of abjurative spellwork or dragonfire conspiracies or how to flirt and act at Hudol parties. Now Aelwyn is learning to sit next to her baby sister at dinner without commenting on her feet on the chair; to dodge Ragh Barkrock as he carries a giant steaming pot of rice out to the table; to silently flick up a little arcane ward between Fig’s hand and the plate of eggrolls just in time for Fig to be distracted by Adaine starting to reach for the last one; to not be surprised when Fig starts half-jokingly hollering at Adaine for it. 

There are so many quiet things to learn and Aelwyn thinks maybe she needs to start a new spellbook to remember them all. There are so many quiet things to learn between her and Adaine, and there are so many loud things to learn about living in Mordred Manor in the bunk under her baby sister’s. On any given day Aelwyn doesn’t have nearly enough of them prepared, or maybe it’s that she doesn’t have enough slots to do all of them yet, but she wants to have them all to hand in a spellbook to try again and again and again until they come cantrip-easy. 

Next to her, Adaine is crowing gleefully with her eggroll in hand as Fig rolls her eyes and settles back in her seat. Aelwyn snaps back into focus (little things. One thing at a time) to find Ragh piling far too much rice on her plate, and she hurriedly shakes her head in a “no thank you that’s enough” because Ragh always says “tell me when to stop” and doesn’t pay attention to whether you’ve heard him. He just grins and tries to give her an elbow-bumping RVS secret handshake while also holding a very heavy pot of rice with the other arm, and Aelwyn will never have his dex but she does try to elbow bump him back. Adaine just leans over and scrapes half of Aelwyn’s rice onto her own plate, and Aelwyn’s fingers twitch to cast the same little ward to stop her. “What in the world are you doing?”

Adaine just puts Aelwyn’s plate back down, half her rice gone. “Stealing your rice!�� she says as if it’s simple as anything. “Ragh gave you too much and I know you never eat more than one scoop, so I’m taking it.” She picks up a clump of rice she’d dropped on the table in the transfer—Aelwyn had noticed, and it was bothering her—and just reaches for the sauce bowl, pouring sweet chili into a little pool on her own plate and then adding a glob to Aelwyn’s own plate without even asking.

A year ago in their father’s house that no longer exists, Adaine wouldn’t have dared. Here and now in the manor, Aelwyn’s just confused. 

“Adaine!”

Her annoying, endearing little baby sister just shrugs at her. “Aren’t you going to want it for your eggroll?” 

Aelwyn looks down at her plate to see, sure enough, half of Adaine’s prized spoils of her little war with Fig on her own plate next to the rice, an eggroll broken in half with crispy skin and juicy filling. 

“You’re welcome,” Adaine says smugly, in the exact same tone that she uses to loudly declare victory over Fig in little dinner table skirmishes.

It’s good food, Lydia’s cooking unquestionably the best in the house, and eggrolls secretly are Aelwyn’s favorite of the non-waybread foods she’s started eating more of ever since moving into the Manor. Aelwyn knows more manners than to not take it. And knows better than to not say thank you.

“Thanks,” she mumbles, and Adaine just shuffles over on the bench a little to rest her head on Aelwyn’s shoulder as she munches on her own half. 

Aelwyn is learning many things but she thinks she knows what to do here, just leaning her head over on top of Adaine’s and smooshing her cheek into the top of Adaine’s hair. Adaine can probably hear her chewing and it’s probably horrifically bad manners but Aelwyn doesn’t care to remember that right now.

Here, in this house that Aelwyn pinches herself a little to remember actually exists, her baby sister is pressed into Aelwyn’s side, picking food off her plate and trading back Aelwyn’s favorites in turn. Aelwyn dips her eggroll in sweet spicy sauce and lets herself not care about manners and thinks that for once she’s sure that this moment is worth remembering. 

from the prompt list linked here! i’m closing prompts from this particular list simply because i have so many excellent ones to get through